WASHINGTON — America may know W. Craig Fugate as the slightly weary-looking guy on CNN explaining the ins and outs of flood insurance. But in the world of emergency management, he is known for his Waffle House matrix.

Fugate, who heads the Federal Emergency Management Agency, learned in his many years of battling natural disasters that fully operational Waffle Houses mean that a community is doing OK. But if those same restaurants are serving half menus, it means that power has been lost. And if their doors are closed, it signifies that things are really bad.

“It’s a shorthand for us to get in there and quickly get a snapshot,” Fugate said Friday at FEMA headquarters in Washington. “Is the Waffle House open? Everything normal there?”

Fugate acknowledges that the Hurricane Sandy disaster poses a challenge to the Waffle House matrix because the chain, popular in the South, has so few restaurants in the Northeast. In place of Waffle Houses, he said, he has looked to Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts as bellwethers, but he said he did not believe that they had the same philosophies about quickly reopening.

“Waffle House has a very simple operational philosophy: Get open. They never close. They run 24 hours a day,” he said. “They have a corporate philosophy that if there is a hurricane or a storm, they try and get their stores open. It don’t matter if they don’t have power, it don’t matter if you don’t have gas. They have procedures that if they can get a generator in there, they’ll get going. They’ll make coffee with bottled water.”

After the agency’s poor handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA was the Homer Simpson of federal agencies, a symbol of pitiful incompetence. The storm even created a national punch line after President George W. Bush said at a news conference that his FEMA director, Michael D. Brown, was doing a “heck of a job” even as the agency was bungling its response.

While FEMA is still viewed with caution — and in some places in New York City in the past week, continued scorn — Fugate has done much to shore up its image, in part simply through self-flagellation even as he races around storm-savaged regions, ticks off statistics about water levels and procures baby formula for a mother in need.

Fugate — or Mr. Emergency Management, as President Barack Obama referred to him last week — is a straightforward former director of Florida emergency operations who judges the post-storm condition of communities by the viability of local economic activity. His focus on local preparation long before disasters hit has been the key to his success, according to several people who have worked with him.

“He speaks the language of first responders because he was one of them,” said Alan Rubin, who oversaw Florida’s economic recovery after Hurricane Andrew. “He doesn’t have to be brought up to speed on what FEMA can do and when they can do it.”

As people in New York and New Jersey on Thursday and Friday remained without power and struggled to find fuel to fill their cars and generators, reports emerged that some were angrily denouncing FEMA as responding too slowly in the aftermath of the hurricane.

“It’s part of how people cope,” Fugate said of the anger toward FEMA. “I don’t care that they don’t understand FEMA, and I’m not going to defend it and say you shouldn’t be mad at us. It’s a natural part of it; they get frustrated and they are going to get angry. I need to acknowledge that, but I need to focus on what are their needs and are we taking care of their needs longer term.”

FEMA’s programs, Fugate said, were really designed to deal with a disaster several days after it occurs and also provide local authorities and first responders with capabilities and equipment that they do not have. The agency may provide financial aid, water-removal specialists and advanced search-and-rescue teams.

“Because we always talk about FEMA so much, I think the general public assumes we are part of the response team that will be there the first couple of days,” he said.

Fugate, 52, got his start in emergency response as a volunteer firefighter and paramedic in Alachua County, Fla., and made his way from there through administrative ranks, becoming the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management in 2001. He has won several awards in the field, and was named to the National Guard Association of Florida Hall of Fame in 2006.

At the end of the Bush administration, he was interviewed to be the head of FEMA — the acting director, R. David Paulison, ended up getting the job — and he said in a later interview that it was a job he would ponder with trepidation. He told a reporter, “A lot of people are looking at what Mike Brown went through” and believed it was “not a good encouragement for people to put their professional careers on the line.”

Fugate has said he is not satisfied with FEMA’s response in New York and New Jersey and would not be until all residents had power and water and a means of transportation.

But he did allow himself a tad of self-defense last week when Brown, his predecessor, knocked the administration for predetermining states as disaster areas. “Better to be fast than to be late,” Fugate said.